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This paper aims to report on a case study conducted in a private medical partnership of more than 50 specialist physicians where the researcher applied a leadership coaching model grounded in existential philosophy. The paper asserts that existential leadership coaching can be a novel and effective means to address leadership development needs in the unique context of a professional partnership.

The qualitative phenomenological study used a bounded case study design using four purposively selected specialist physicians who were involved in four individual structured coaching sessions over an eight-week period. Data came in writing from participants in the form of reflective questions before and after the coaching, and note-taking on index cards during the coaching process. Data also came from the coach/researcher as a participant observer in the form of note-taking and a reflective journal.

Findings indicate that working with perceptions of leadership in existential coaching conversations can provide a mechanism for members of a partnership to find greater purpose, and choose how they can contribute better to leadership development in their collective. Findings indicate that the process of imaging the perceptions of fellow partners can unlock the identification of and choice for developmental actions and contributions to the collective.

For the selected qualitative design, the researcher as the participant observer provided advantages such as insider access and depth of engagement. The study was limited to a small sample in a particular time and context. Findings are thus viewed in the light of this unique case.

Such a qualitative phenomenological case study provides glimpses into the lives of real-life leaders and offers the coaching, academic and medical fraternities an insider understanding of leadership development in the case of professional partnerships.

The paper points to a mechanism which may be a means to unlock potential and facilitate leadership development in the context of professional partnerships.

George Spencer Brown is best known for his book Laws of Form, which elaborates a primary algebra of distinctions and forms capable of dealing with self-referential equations reflective of paradoxes in logic. The book has received little attention in mathematics, but it has greatly influenced cybernetics, communications, and ecological theories. But Spencer Brown also published poetry and stories, often under different names, and he practiced as a psychotherapist. Our chapter elaborates the utility of Laws of Form relating to organizational paradox before considering Spencer Brown’s other works in relation to his mathematics. Invoking philosophy, psychoanalysis and art, we suggest that these indicate a further distinction that sets all forms against the “nothing”: a wholeness or unity from out of which all distinctions, all words, meaning and life – but also all silence, nonsense and death – emerge in paradoxical opposition. Reading Spencer Brown not through the prism of mathematics, but as an evocative invitation to engage with the fissures that animate art and human life, highlights the paradoxical interplay of organization and violence; and how tragedy, suffering, sympathy and love should be more prominent in organizational research.

Information technology is not a solution, it is a tool which can be used to handle business problems, according to one of the speakers at a recent conference on warehouse and distribution software organised by the National Materials Handling Centre. Speakers came from a wide range of organisations — supplier companies, food distributors, and retailers such as Marks & Spencer.

Within this application brief, we propose a comprehensive model for mapping the shape and optimizing the effectiveness of leadership education in campus-wide university settings. The four-level model is highlighted by inclusion of a philosophy statement detailing the values and purpose of leadership education on campus, a set of skills and competencies that serve as learning goals, a map of formal educational and informal practice opportunities for leadership development, and a plan for assessment and evaluation of effectiveness in both formative and summative contexts. We provide the example of leadership education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to illustrate how the model might look on one campus.

Offers advice to managers to help them get the most out of meetings with journalists.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the legacy of six pioneer child care researchers.

An assessment of the achievements of a generation of child care researchers.

The early researchers were not only highly innovative in terms of theory and methodologies but also left a set of studies that stimulated and informed subsequent studies.

A review of the work of six pioneering child care researchers.

Studies of the cyclical behavior of real wages have identified monetary shocks and examined the response of real wages and output or employment. A finding that real wages are procyclical in response to a positive monetary policy shock is taken as evidence that prices are stickier than wages. The purpose of this paper is to show that factors other than wage and price stickiness affect the response of real wages to a monetary policy shock.

The authors simulate two prominent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models under a variety of parameter values and examine the cyclicality of the real wage.

The authors offer robust evidence that the real wage response to monetary policy is affected in important ways by properties of the economy other than stickiness of wages and prices, such as the importance of intermediate goods in the production process and the size of key elasticities. Consequently, the authors cannot appropriately infer the relative stickiness of wages and prices from examining only the response of real wages to a monetary policy shock.

The authors show in this study that examining the response of real wages is not enough to sort out the relative stickiness of prices and wages.